Great Gatsby Exegesis Chap 4-9

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Nguyen

Matthew Nguyen

English 3 AP/IB

Mrs. Hinman

14 October 2008

Chap. 4-9 Exegesis

I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then.  His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all.  The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.  He was a son of God – a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that – and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, meretricious beauty.  So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. (Fitzgerald 98)

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In his portrayal of Gatsby’s past, Fitzgerald uses diction to demonstrate the embracement of individualism by American society during the 1920’s.  Since individualism was the dominant ideology of the 1920’s, Americans have always embraced the idea that individuals, not entities, had the ultimate authority in deciding America’s course.   Since the responsibility for determining one’s life lay with the individual, he had the opportunity to engage in any activity he saw fit in order to become the person he wanted to be. For James Gatz, forming a new identity was his brand of individuality. "To spring" and "conception" suggest that ...

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